It is my personal belief (and others too) that 'migratory' beekeeping, they way it is now conducted, has done more harm to honeybees than any other human caused factor.

So simple, if you make your living with bees, you need minimum 700 hives to run business.You cannot keep hives in one place. You must migrate them. That is professional beekeeping. Rape field blooms only 2 weeks. What do you do then with hives? You have still 50 weeks left in a year.

steady place do not give yield the whole year. So it is better to move hives from pasture to pasture.

Like my home yeard gives only 30 kg per hive, because there is not enough flowers for that hive number. So I move them 5-20 km away, and I may get there 100 kg hive and solitary hives may get 200 kg.

USA is the only place wher CCD exists. They move their hives to tropical conditions and winter their hives in summer conditions. And like you, you get open feeding even in winter that bees have not winter rest. --- And you just feeded hives a month ago?

You need a remote means of measuring the temp at different levels inside the cluster area and outside it without the measurement process altering the readings i.e with the roof on.inside the cluster to measure the activity of th ebees, outside the cluster to see the contribution of the hive. I'm moving from thermocouples to digital temperature acquisition system that I have made with typically 16 measurement point per hive but it could go as high as 8 per frame

A beekeeping college did this with a few inexpensive thermometers, the indoor out door kind with a cable and a sensor that he placed throughout the hive.He could also determine where the bee mass was by the temperature readings. He didn't have to open the hive to take readings and disturb the bees.

I know of 3 commercial bee keepers around me and not a single one is a migratory bee keeper. One guy has a huge honey house, wood shop, and storage barn that probably cost $150,000+ to build. He gets around 32 tons of honey a year here in Michigan without moving hives. That’s 29,000kg of honey. How many kg is Finski getting?

As T Beek says, bee keeping is local, it depends a lot on your climate. In Michigan we have something flowing all summer long and it is not required to move hives around to get large yields. Could we get even bigger yields by moving hives to monoculture fields every couple of weeks? Maybe, but it is not necessary to be profitable in my area. Moving hives requires more labor, gasoline, time, and money; one must balance that against potentially higher yields, pesticide exposure, loss of bees and CCD.

Edward, that is interesting. There are some low cost instrumentation systems available here that allow you to record data onto a Flash Chip (SD card) and then download the data to your computer for display. If I didn’t have some more pressing problems right now, I would give that a try first. They come with about 8 channels you can hook thermistors onto to get temperature readings.

That would work for getting readings around the cluster, but it might be difficult to stuff the thermistors down into the cluster. What would really be neat would be a plastic frame/foundation with embedded thermistors over the face of the foundation! Then you could get temperature readings and be able to accurately map them over the volume of the cluster.

I know of 3 commercial bee keepers around me and not a single one is a migratory bee keeper. One guy has a huge honey house, wood shop, and storage barn that probably cost $150,000+ to build. He gets around 32 tons of honey a year here in Michigan without moving hives. That’s 29,000kg of honey. How many kg is Finski getting?

As T Beek says, bee keeping is local, it depends a lot on your climate. In Michigan we have something flowing all summer long and it is not required to move hives around to get large yields. Could we get even bigger yields by moving hives to monoculture fields every couple of weeks? Maybe, but it is not necessary to be profitable in my area. Moving hives requires more labor, gasoline, time, and money; one must balance that against potentially higher yields, pesticide exposure, loss of bees and CCD.

yes but your man is going for HONEY --it is possible to run static yards without migrating-most keepers that are migratory in the true sense of the word are POLLINATORS-they have to move to and with the crops-not everything blooms same time-almond -cheery-apricots -peach apple- pear and so it goes they follow the bloom----as far as local pollinators filling the bill it simply wont work in the huge corporate monoculture of agriculture we have today-there is more to it than being self sustaining --we gota feed the world--its a double edge sword---RDY-B

Beekeeping is local. Yes to ensure that you bye colonies from Austaralia, you move colonies from Florida to Alaska.

"The packs for Washington are 3# an 4#. Price for 3# is 85.00, 4# for 95.00. San Juan Island 100.00.

The Alaskan Packs are 5# We also have 4#'s. Price for 4# 135.00. Price for 5# 145.00.

All Packages come with mated Queens.

All payments are due when the bees are ordered. Check, Cash and Credit Cards.

Make Alaska wildflover honey

Last year a 4 pound package was selling for between $130 and $145 depending on which supplier you ordered from.

We will be bringing in packages from our same supplier that we have used for many years. John has consistently given us healthy 4 pound packages with great queens. John has had to increase his price by $5 this year.

If shipping structures stay the same as last year, I would expect that our package price will be $135 for a 4 pound package, We will be able to more accurately predict shipping rates in mid-January.

Once again, we will target the middle of April for the bee delivery dates. We have scheduled the first load of bees to arrive on the 13th of April. More bees will arrive on the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th with the last load arriving on the 24th.

Bees are shipped over a 6 day period to minimize the risk of package loss. Shipping by airfreight is always a challenge due to the limited space on cargo planes. We reserve priority space well in advance to assure that our bees have as direct and quick transport as possible. We have had good success shipping bees to Alaska.

Send us an email if you want to order your bees for next spring.

A limited number of hived packages on new comb will be available for pickup in May! Call us for details or check out our services page.

Good point Rdy-b and of course you are right too. Finski seemed to be suggesting that commercial HONEY production depended upon migration and that is simply not the case in my area.

yes and i believe it is far more profitable for the honey producer to be local-better market price and less overhead -and we already know its better for the bees---happy bees are productive bees--RDY-B